Beggars, Almajiri and the future of the Nigerian nation

Beggars are a common presence on the streets of most Nigerian cities. The roadside beggar population may be broken into broad categories of ‘life-style’ beggars and the physically and mentally disabled.

Roadside destitution has its demographics and economics which may not be immediately clear to the fleeting perception of the passer-by, whose reactions are influenced variously by kindness, when he gives, or by guilt, when he silently queries his own right to have when so many clearly don’t have, or by irritation, when the antics of a persistent beggar reveals to him that the fellow has a sense of entitlement and is not excessively motivated by concern for his fellow citizen or the offence his behaviour may cause him.

The economics of the situation for a city like Lagos, is that the average beggar earns more from his ‘work’, in a day, than the average civil servant, or the average market woman. This fact may come as a surprise to many, but is one that is well known to people on the street.

That a large proportion of citizens with physical and mental disabilities in Nigeria are reduced to begging on the streets for a living is testimony to a huge failure in the medical and psychosocial infrastructure all across the nation. That a place such as Lagos which has a number of ‘special schools’ and ‘homes’ for the training and rehabilitation of children with various types of disability may be considered somewhat well provisioned is only a relative description, reflective of the absolute lack of structure and service for that segment of the population all across the nation. And yet the truth is that at least one out of every hundred children born in any society will have, or acquire, a serious physical disability. Another one out of that hundred, at the very least, will have, or acquire, a serious mental disability. Apart from these ‘best case’ statistics, there is a lot of ‘avoidable’ disability as a result vaccine-preventable illnesses such as polio, and even road traffic accidents. Disability, therefore, is not a rare occurrence in society, and not something to be quickly glossed over in polite conversation. It is not something to be addressed by giving alms to children rendered paraplegic by polio on the streets. It is something to be planned and provided for in the normal run of things.The disabled – visually impaired, mobility impaired, or mentally impaired ideally should be diagnosed as early as possible in the course of their disability, properly assessed, and channeled into the appropriate stream for treatment, for education, and for rehabilitation so as to limit the secondary impairments arising from their disability to the barest minimum. Where this is done, they keep pace, more or less, with their peers, and most are able to live meaningful, active lives, independent or semi-independent, contributing positively to society.

Unfortunately this is not the case in Nigeria. The few that are able to get recognition and remedial inputs do so after they have been in limbo or hidden away for several years, and have almost reached the limits of educability. Disability, sadly, is taken as a cultural entitlement to charity. It is a state of affairs that is demeaning both to the disabled, and to the society itself.

But the danger – the real problem for Nigeria, is that portended by those who constitute the demographic majority of the street population – the able-bodied ‘life-style’ beggar the overwhelming majority of whom are ‘emigres’ from the North of Nigeria. As a visible demonstration of the size of this issue, every day, train and truck loads of beggars are ‘imported’ into Lagos from different centres in the North and disgorged on the streets. In Iyana Iba, as on the Lekki Expressway by Jakande junction, you encounter men, women and children who have transplanted themselves, or been transplanted, to live the rest of their lives begging on the streets of a strange city. The children are uneducated, and the adults are uninterested in learning a skill or doing anything but sitting on the streets, begging. The situation makes nonsense of the efforts of host state to enforce free, compulsory education for its citizens. It also makes nonsense of its efforts to ensure all children are vaccinated against disease. It is an abiding nightmare for the social worker.

But it is possible to cone down further on a narrower, even more sinister reality within the ‘Begging’ culture and the danger it portends for the Nigerian entity. This is the phenomenon of ‘Almajiri’.

Almajiri are supposed to be children receiving ‘religious instruction’ under ‘teachers’ who board and lodge them in their ‘schools’. In reality they are scruffy children with dirty begging bowls who swarm over the streets and motor-parks in the northern part of the nation, begging for a living and making a nuisance of themselves.

The numbers almajiri children on the streets in the towns and cities of Northern Nigeria are humongous. It is said there are millions in Kano State alone.

The Governor of Kano State has just come out with a statement that is intended to show how well he is tackling the problem. He has added some ‘core’ subject to the curriculum of the schools built for them. They now study Mathematics, in addition to, of course, Religious Instruction.

Almajiri are not just an innocuous presence on the street, in the motor-park, not just an aesthetic displeasure for the sights of well-heeled fellow citizens sitting in their cars, who they accost with their grimy fingers and dirty bowls, begging for money.

Their significance is not just about the poverty they epitomize. Extreme poverty in youth is not new to Nigeria. After Chief Obafemi Awolowo introduced Free Education in the Western Region, his team went round some of the ramshackle schools where the youth he was seeking to educate were receiving their lessons. The poverty in the air was clearly visible. Many of the children in the fading black and white photographs were in rags. Some were quite naked. Nearly all were barefooted. But their eyes were bright with hope as they posed with the politicians and civil servants.

Two sets of Nigerian children then, bare-footed, half-naked. One set the Almajiri on the streets in Kano. The other the naked school children milling round the team from Ibadan, the regional capital.

Nobody saw the bare-footed children around Awo in the photo as a problem, and neither did the children themselves seem to think they had anything to be ashamed of as they stuck poses for the flash bulb. Many of them had walked up to twenty miles from their parents’ homesteads and farms to get to school this morning. They had left their parents, who recognized the value of what they were doing, and who expected them to come back, walking the same lengthy miles through the footpaths and shrubbery to help out in the farm after school.

They had hope – many of the naked children in the photo – the beneficiaries of the vision and the largesse of Free Education from their leader and their society. Many of the wretched looking boys in the photos have since gone on to fulfill the hope that shone in their eyes. They have become Professors of Surgery and captains Industry and leaders of thought in various ways. They would smile ruefully to see their old photos now.

The almajiris ,by contrast, are poverty and wretchedness heading nowhere but south, and rapidly. They are children who will grow up soon to become untrained and un-trainable young men and women. They will roam the streets with hunger in their eyes and anger in their hearts, young folks unfit for any meaningful occupation in the age of the internet, holding a grudge against everyone, including the religious leaders who purport to be their sponsors, teachers or supporters.

A piece of history is instructive here. There were occasional episodes of civil disturbance in the country during the years when Ibrahim Babangida was the self-proclaimed military President of Nigeria. In one of the worst episodes, when the streets of Kano had momentarily been turned into killing fields and soldiers were out in the streets seeking to impose law and order, it had become obvious that among the most enthusiastic killers and looters perpetrating the disturbance were the almajiri children, who roamed the streets sword and cudgel in hand. The army general in charge of the troops, a lean and wiry old warrior from the Middle Belt, had his men disarm the young killers and sat them down on one of the main roads of Kano, row after row of almajiri, a hundred, two hundred thick. The photos made good press in the national newspapers the following day.

After the young men had been sitting on the road for hours, as evidence that the Army was now in control and Kano was safe again, it fell to a prominent cleric to cry out in their support. His cry was that the soldiers were making the ‘innocent young men’ sit in the hot sun on the Kano highway, while their parents were waiting for them at home.

It was a serious plea, not done tongue in cheek. For all that, it was as disingenuous as it was laughable. Parents? That was the first anyone heard that the almajiri had ‘parents’. If they had parents, what were they doing on the streets in the first place?

The same questions, the same mischief, and the same sinister implications surround the issue today, on a vastly larger scale than was even imaginable in ‘President’ Babangida’s time. For since those ‘innocent’ days, there have been Al Qaeda, and ISIS, and Boko Harem, and countless other poisonous ideologies that find fertile ground in the minds of disaffected, dis-connected young men and women who have no knowledge, no hope and no stake in society. The almajiri are a social menace that has already poisoned the air and the water, contributing to mindless killings that have gone into the gory past of Nigeria, as well as constituting ready perpetrators and cannon fodder for ongoing terror. But the harm they have already wrought is as nothing compared to the social and physical explosions they stand to cause in the future.

It is not enough for anyone to sit smugly in Lagos or Ibadan and think the almajiri is a problem far removed from them. The demographics and the dynamics indicate that it is a problem of the North that will soon become a problem for everybody. The sociologic fallout from a dysfunctionally stratified society cannot be contained within the amorphous boundaries of artificial states. As long as Nigeria remains a federation, or even a confederation, and people are able to move across state boundaries without hindrance, the almajiri are a time bomb waiting to explode in Port Harcourt, as in Kaduna.

A few Northern leaders are waking up to the specific danger represented by the almajiri and the general dangers posed by a huge population of street beggars disconnected from society, living off handouts from people, and providing cannon fodder for political and tribal warfare. The Governor of Kaduna State is trying to ban street begging, an act which unfortunately will require more than a law to practicalise. The Governor of Kano is, as we have said, announcing proudly to the world that he is introducing ‘core’ subjects such as Mathematics to the education almajiri children are receiving in the schools specially created for them. Of course it is widely understood that those of the almajiri that are ‘enrolled’ in these ‘special’ schools attend school at their leisure, and go out from school as they please begging bowl in hand to ply their ‘trade’ on the streets. The Governor is celebrating what is essentially an exercise in futility.

How does a caring society begin to approach the problems of street begging and the almajiri with the use of knowledge, so that it gives itself an actual chance of getting a handle on it? Afterall Dr Mahathir Mohammed, founding father of modern Malaysia – a Muslim majority country, always took pains to emphasise that he was building a ‘Knowledge Society’, and that this required him to micromanage the most minute details of the social structure, from limiting family size, to relations between ethnic Malays and Chinese, to compulsory education and a ban on street dwelling and street begging.

The solution of the almajiri problem, and its corollaries, will determine if the North of Nigeria, and perhaps Nigeria itself, has a future.

But it is not complex at all. The solution, for the bold society thatcares enough to grasp the beast by the horn, is very straight forward indeed. It is not about pounding the chest about introducing ‘core subjects’ in schools nobody takes seriously.

The scruffy children in the almajiri scenario need to be remade in the mould of the naked children posing in the photo with Awolowo when he gave them Free Education and set them on the trajectory to a new life. Those children had parents to go home to, parents who followed their progress in school and ensured they did their homework and passed their exams.

That is the missing link. Every child in a healthy society must be owned by parents, or owned by the State.

Every child, like every adult, must be documented. Every child for whom there is no one to perform the functions of parent must become a ward of the State. The state becomes the parent and performs all the functions of parenting – from housing to feeding, to loving and nurturing to disciplining, and supervising homework.

If this is not done in Kano, in Kaduna, and in all the places where the almajiri are a blight on society, building hundreds of schools and ‘introducing core subjects’ will be just money down the drain. The children have to be named and owned first. That they are in the millions is just reflective of the fact that the North has a huge problem on its hands, and the cost of the solution will be humongous. It also means that, though government ‘owns’ the problem, everybody – individuals and the organized private sector will have to chip in resources for the gargantuan task of effective education and rehabilitation. Channels will need to be created for people to make their personal and religious charity contributions towards such a purpose. It is only then that extant or new laws banning street begging can be effectively enforced.

Every citizen has the right to a reasonably good life in society, and the responsibility to take every chance available to him to pursue one. Begging is NOT a right belonging to anybody. But that can only be asserted when the other things are put in place, and a measure of social security and citizen responsibility is available to all.The cost of doing nothing to solve the problem with good thinking will be incalculable for the North, and the entire Nigerian nation.